Beast
by Soleya
Summary: Sometimes the price of progress is far too high. And sometimes the monster is the man standing right beside you.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: They aren't mine, of course, but this one could have actually happened.

I didn't want to bother my poor betas, so typos or continuity errors are mine and mine alone.

This is dedicated to Celia, who sent me so many wonderful reviews during a very, very bad week, and all the lovely people who take time to write me notes. Reviews always make me smile.

* * *

 **Beast**

"How's it going?"

Sam Carter spun from the control panel in front of her to face her CO, her hands held up in a vague gesture at the equipment all around her. She looked truly boggled, and that wasn't an emotion Jack associated with her. At all. "I could spend years here, sir," she told him.

"Can we not?" he asked. "The food sucks."

That earned a laugh before she said, "I don't get the feeling they eat for pleasure."

"I don't get the feeling they do much for pleasure," he answered, and his expression said clearly how he felt about that. "The nerds don't, anyway."

She offered him a shrug and a shake of her head. "It's hard for me to judge them, sir. The Seladians want progress, and they're getting it. A hundred years ago, Earth was in the middle of our Second Industrial Revolution. The first mass production of steel, electricity and the light bulb, the automobile. This planet was still twenty years away from any of that, and now they're decades ahead. They're churning out advancements half again as fast as we are. Tell me that's not incredible."

"Is this your argument for more PBS funding?" he asked wryly. He got a second chuckle out of that and mentally patted himself on the back, pleased. He tried his damnedest to keep her from becoming an automaton like some of the people he'd seen there that week.

"You're not wrong, sir. The government has allocated billions of dollars to this: astrophysics, genetics, chemistry. But I suppose I'm not really in a position to complain. I'm better funded than most scientists on Earth, I think."

"Is that why you stick around, Carter? Diamonds are a girl's best friend?"

She cringed. "And you let me shoot things?"

"There's that," he admitted. "How long, you think?"

"Um…." Her eyes darted across the monitors, lips pursing.

"You spent the first two days with the chemistry guys," he prompted. "Then physics, now medical…."

"Yeah." Obviously not keen on the idea of a deadline, she asked, "How's Daniel coming along?"

"He says two more days. So, three. But only because Teal'c's pushing him along."

She considered that with a hum. "Labs Four is all biomedical, and Caten's already given me four memory chips to dig through. I could probably gather up the highlights in two days, though Janet might want more later. And another day to look over the geology and atmospheric conditions, and-"

"So, three."

"If I had to." It was weak.

"Carter, I need cake."

She sucked in a breath for patience and said, "Yes, sir."

Her eyes shifted to the doorway behind him and went cool, and he knew who'd walked in even before the smooth female voice said, "Colonel O'Neill. Major Carter."

"Doctor Tyre."

The facility director didn't bother to look at the other woman; her brown eyes focused intently on Jack as he greeted, "Rina."

"Ambassador Ferin tells me you didn't care for lunch," she said, a small smile on her face. "Again. I've had some things brought in that I thought you might like to try. Dessert."

He waggled his eyebrows at Carter and said, "Cake."

"Yes, sir."

The answer was flat, and it wasn't because of the subject matter. Carter had been carefully pleasant and professional with Rina, but her dislike was totally transparent to the other members of SG-1. And Jack couldn't blame her – there was something off about the woman. She was always too composed, always with a pleasant smile. It was the expression of someone pretending to be your ally right before they shoved a knife in your gut, so though she'd been flirting with Jack for four days already, he wasn't about to bite. He was pretty sure that hook would be painful to yank out.

But she was damned attractive, a perfect hourglass with high cheekbones and a penchant for stilettos and short skirts. So it hadn't been easy.

"And if not food, I'm sure we can find something that piques your interest, Colonel."

Boy, she wasn't even trying to hide it anymore. Jack wondered if Rina heard the huff as Carter turned back to her work. "You gotten a chance to look at their weapons yet?" he asked his teammate.

She didn't look over. "No, sir."

" _That_ would pique my interest."

The brown eyes went almost imperceptibly cool. "Of course. Lab Nine contains several prototypes, and I'm sure our engineers would be happy to speak with you." She turned on one high heel and clicked out into the corridor, clearly expecting him to follow.

He turned to Carter, instead. "You good?"

Whatever she muttered sounded like, "Better than she is."

"What?"

"Fine, sir. Try not to shoot anyone."

He wondered if she had a particular target in mind. "See ya later."

~/~

"Anything particular you're looking for, Major?"

Sam shot Doctor Caten a smile as he stepped up beside her. "Nothing I can think of yet. It's all fascinating. You've cured a few diseases that we've been researching for years. We can manage they symptoms, but not actually solve the problem. I wish…. I wish we had more to give you in exchange."

That earned a chuckle. "Major Carter, you've explored the universe. Your Gate telemetry and the cultural information you've provided us is more than enough. I've always wondered what happened on the other side of that wormhole, but our first few expeditions didn't go well, and the government decided it wasn't worth the risk."

"There's risk, for sure," she said. "But also opportunity. Incredible opportunity. Like this."

He offered a smile. "I'm glad you think so. You're putting us years ahead in exploration."

"And us in genetics. Our Chief Medical Officer will be thrilled."

"Then I made the right call." Digging in his chest pocket, he pulled out a tiny chip and handed it to her. "When you're finished with what I brought you this morning, there's more here."

There always seemed to be more. A stunning amount, and she smiled in gratitude. "Thank you."

"Well. There are some ongoing projects in Lab Five that I need to look in on, but if you decide you need additional information, just have me paged. I'll access the relevant files for you." With a nod, he left her to her work.

~/~

"We have multiple non-lethal options, too," an engineer told Jack, pulling a new drawer out of the wall to display the weapons inside.

"Less than lethal," his lab mate corrected.

"There have been a few unfortunate incidents," the first guy – Raley? Rauley? - conceded. "But they're meant to be non-lethal. This one is basically our version of a Goa'uld zat'ni… zat… uh…."

"Zat," Jack offered.

"Right. It disrupts the body's electrical field, causing temporary paralysis and usually unconsciousness. It's a personal favorite with the staff around here."

"Well, non-lethal is good."

Raley grinned at him. "No. Because none of them have very good aim."

Jack chuckled.

"And since most of our other weaponry is laser-based, it's a very narrow beam spread. Skill counts for a lot."

"I'll bet. What else you got?"

"Colonel." That was Rina, who he'd ignored for a solid half hour. And she wasn't happy about it.

"Yeah?" he asked innocently.

"You seem to be getting on quite well here." The words didn't come out quite as civil as she'd probably planned. "If you don't mind, I have other things to attend to."

One hand raised in a flippant wave. "See ya."

The perfectly mannered expression faltered for just half a second before she turned and clicked away.


	2. Chapter 2

Sam scanned the information in front of her with increasing unease. The files she'd worked with all morning and well into the afternoon included research on cloning animals – which the natives had perfected two decades earlier – and she supposed she should have known the experiments would extend to humans, but it made her chest tight.

Progress, she reminded herself. They valued progress. The Seladians weren't a religious people, and she needed to be wary of putting her own moral views on their work. Besides, two babies instead of one was hardly the end of the world.

Except that the harvest site for the original embryo was listed, and Gareth Reproductive Medicine sounded a lot like a fertility clinic. The file said nothing more about it except that the original had been implanted successfully into the donor and the clone into another 'carrier,' but Sam's gut wanted more. Did the biological mother know her child would be cloned? And given to another woman? Did the other woman know she'd received a clone? Or even that she'd received an embryo that wasn't hers? She had so many questions about the ethics of it all.

Their culture was different, she reminded herself. And cloning was partly controversial on Earth because they weren't sure it was safe for humans, while the Seladians had already perfected the technique with multiple animals. And the file said both children were healthy. Blowing out a deep breath, she tried to set her discomfort aside to move on to the next file.

It wasn't any better. They were gene-splicing – not just for medical reasons, but for aesthetics, and that had always rubbed her the wrong way. Still, if a woman wanted her child to have brown eyes, who was Sam to judge? If it meant curing diseases and fixing chromosomal abnormalities, maybe eye color wasn't so important.

And then a facility name jumped out at her: South Side Family Services. She scoured the data and realized that the five embryos they were testing had all come from the same woman but had been individually implanted – into the donor and four others. And Sam just couldn't shake the niggling feeling that something underhanded was going on. Especially when she ran a search for the two facility names and they came up in twelve different files.

Cloning. Gene splicing. Stem cell research. Gene mapping a developing fetus. Swapping embryos between overweight and thin mothers to determine the effects of the placenta and womb on the baby. A set of quadruplets had been raised entirely in an artificial womb, and that was an incredible feat. But the identical children were split for the sake of nature/nurture studies, and one had been raised without language. Another without touch. That wasn't controversial; that was abusive, and again, she had to wonder if the mothers had consented to this. If they even knew.

Then she opened the file that admitted it point-blank: researchers were secretly swapping women's prenatal vitamins for experimental drugs to study the results. Miscarriages. Birth defects.

Sam almost didn't want to see the next file, but she had to. She had to know how far down the rabbit hole these people had gone to accurately report it to Colonel O'Neill and her superiors on Earth. To convince them that these people weren't ethical or trustworthy.

 _Error. Shortcut Broken. File Not Found._

For a long moment, she could only stare at the message. A broken shortcut on her lab computer usually meant she'd moved or deleted something, so she searched the drive for that file number and came up empty. Which meant, she thought, that Caten had removed it before he'd given her the memory chip. And _that_ was terrifying. If they'd given her access to so many ethically questionable experiments without so much as a blink, what were they hiding?

She knew she probably shouldn't, but she plugged the search into the mainframe. The file name came up immediately, and she clicked to open it.

 _This File Requires Level 7 Access. Please Enter Your Passcode._

She _definitely_ shouldn't. But she hacked it.

The images that popped up on screen were horrifying. Fetuses in all stages of development, all clearly lifeless. With malformed hands and sunken skulls. And tails. And webbed toes. There were infants, too, clearly alive but not in better shape.

Hundreds of them. She scanned the documentation and found a numbered list of every attempt. And it ran to the tens of thousands.

God, she was going to be sick.

Taking a deep breath to quell the nausea, she keyed her radio. "Carter to O'Neill."

"How's it coming along, Major?" the tiny speaker crackled.

"Not like I thought," she said simply, uncertain who else might overhear. "Could you come to the lab, sir? I've found something I think you should see."

"Yeah," he clipped. "I'm five minutes out."

"Yes, sir." Digging in her pocket for one of the memory chips, she turned back to the computer console and exported the files in their entirety. It would be a quicker transfer that way, though they didn't have the technology to read it on Earth… but that had never stopped her before. Extracting the chip, she clipped it into its storage case and dropped it back into a pocket.

"What are you doing?"

That was a rhetorical question, obviously; the information was displayed sickeningly clearly on the monitors all around her. Hackles rising, Sam turned to find ice in Caten's eyes that matched his words. She responded in kind. "Is this still going on? Are you still…." She didn't even have the words for it. "Still… mutilating children? What have you done with them?"

"It would be better if you hadn't seen this."

Frankly, she didn't disagree with that. She would never be able to forget what she'd seen. But the frigid words were clearly a threat, and as he tapped a red button near the door, she warned, "Colonel O'Neill is already on his way."

"And he will find nothing," Caten said as the doors slid open to admit three armed guards, "because there will be nothing here for him to find. Take her."

She grabbed for her zat and even had the privilege of watching the first soldier fall. But there were four of them and one of her, and she couldn't beat them all to the punch. Her torso exploded in pain.

And everything went black.


	3. Chapter 3

Jack arrived in Lab Four to find it vacant. Completely. There was no sign of his 2IC or any of the equipment she'd had with her that morning, and he double-checked the number on the door with a frown before keying his radio. "O'Neill to Carter."

"Can I help you with something, Colonel?" Rina's voice asked sweetly from the doorway behind him.

He hadn't gotten an answer on the radio, and Jack repeated the call before turning to the young woman. "Yeah. Where's Carter?"

Two wide brown eyes blinked in surprise. "I don't know. I haven't seen her in hours."

"That's crap," he said flatly. "She asked me to meet her here." His fingers found his radio again. "Daniel. Teal'c. Get to Lab Four. Now."

"Is everything okay, Jack?" Daniel asked, and the colonel ignored him, staring down the woman in the doorway. "We're on our way."

"Perhaps she moved to another lab," Rina said simply.

He wasn't buying the innocent act and repeated coldly, "Where's Carter?"

"I have no idea, Colonel," she insisted in that same saccharine tone. "But it's a large complex. I'd be happy to help you find her."

Somehow he knew that meant she wasn't there to be found. And his stomach sank.

~/~

Sam woke on the floor of some sort of transport vehicle. The road it rumbled down obviously wasn't smooth; she lifted her head a bit to stop her skull from bouncing against the metal floor. If she had to guess, she'd say the aliens used some sort of plastic strapping to restrain prisoners like they did on Earth. It cut uncomfortably into her wrists behind her back, and while she could twist them a bit, she couldn't pull them apart.

She needed her radio. Her gun. _Something_. But she'd been stripped to her t-shirt and camo pants, her holsters and radio gone. Rolling awkwardly to her knees, bracing herself against the rocking and bumping of the vehicle, she checked every dark corner in the distant hope that they'd thrown her gear in with her. They hadn't.

Colonel O'Neill would be looking for her. She had no idea how much time had passed since she'd spoken to him, but surely it had been more than five minutes. And that meant he – along with Daniel and Teal'c – was on the warpath. He would find her. He always did.

The vehicle shuddered to a halt, nearly sending her to the floor, and she didn't want the enemy to find her that way. She would have gotten to her feet if she could, but the ceiling was far too low, so she waited on her knees until the metal door opened. Caten and two guards stood outside, silhouetted in the soft pink light of the late afternoon sun, and he ordered, "Out."

She didn't have much choice in the matter, so she shuffled toward the opening until the soldiers grabbed her arms and hauled her roughly over the bumper, hardly giving her time to get her feet under her. They were in the middle of a forest; the road they'd taken was overgrown but had once been frequently traveled, the tree branches broken back by vehicles. The lights of the city were nowhere to be seen. "Where are we?"

"You asked what we did with them," Caten replied simply. "I thought you'd like an answer."

She didn't know what that meant, but one of the soldiers shoved her toward the road. Without any other good options, she started down it, carefully stepping around thick vines and tree roots. They walked perhaps a quarter mile, her eyes carefully on the shaded path the whole way, before she saw better light ahead.

The clearing was man-made, obviously. Like the road, though, it hadn't been tended in years, and nature was creeping in at the edges. The space was mounded a bit, pitted, flush with flowers and small plant growth, and for the second time that day, she nearly vomited. Because she knew deep in her gut what made the new flora grow so thick and lush.

They were being fertilized by the decomposing bodies underneath.

She stared out at the mass grave, tears pricking at her eyes, and just barely managed, "You're a monster."

" _They_ were monsters," Caten corrected. "Animals. Mutants. And they were put down."

"You made them!" she cried. " _You_ created them, exactly as they were, and then you discarded them like garbage. You murdered them."

"They were the products of a failed experiment," he told her with a shrug. "Medical waste. Nothing more."

"No." It came out a growl even as tears welled up in grief and outrage. "You know this was wrong. You _know_ this was wrong, or you wouldn't try so hard to hide it!"

"Well. It's stayed hidden for years now, and it certainly isn't going to be exposed by some high and mighty alien with an overactive conscience. This is going to stay buried. And you can be buried with it."

A strong hand on her upper arm drove her to the edge of the clearing and to her knees. It was the end of the line, she knew, but the tear that slid down her cheek wasn't for herself. They had been _children_ , victims of the science she loved so dearly, and the waste of it all – the inhumanity of it – struck deeply. There were monsters here, for sure. But they were above ground. Among the living, not the dead.

"It's a pity you couldn't mind your own business, Major," Caten said from behind her. "We could have learned much from each other."

"I don't want anything from you," she gritted back.

"Very well."

She was supposed to close her eyes – that was what people did when they were executed, wasn't it? - but she couldn't tear her gaze from the mound in front of her. She couldn't make peace here. Not on the grounds of such an atrocity.

"Do it," Caten ordered, and she drew a slow, deep breath.

A tree branch snapped behind her, accompanied by a snarl like she'd only heard at the start of MGM movies. There was a scream, then a second right on top of it – both human – and she twisted on her knees to figure out what was happening as weapons fire sounded but didn't hit her. But all she could see was blood and shredded skin and the fur of some massive carnivore, too huge and too fast to really see as it ripped the men beneath it to shreds. She couldn't believe her dumb luck, but she wasn't about to question it.

And she wasn't about to stick around, because when the creature finished with Caten and his men, she was certain she was going to be dessert. Struggling to her feet, she ran for the woods.


	4. Chapter 4

" _Where the hell is Carter_?" Jack raged at the group surrounding them. "People don't just disappear!"

"If we could help you, Colonel, we would," Rina assured him, "but no one has seen her since you and I left. She must have wandered off of her own volition."

"Funny you felt the need to specify that last part," he snarled.

"Is that an accusation, Colonel?" Ambassador Ferin asked.

"You bet your ass it is. I want my teammate. Now."

"As I told you, Colonel-"

"You have no idea where she is," Daniel interrupted, waving a hand at Rina to cut her off. "Excuse me for being blunt, but that's a lie. There are cameras everywhere. You could find her if you wanted to. You could tell us exactly where she is, and you won't."

"My men have been sweeping the cameras," a uniformed officer told them. "Wherever she is, she's out of range."

"But you know where she _was_ ," Jack pressed. "You know where she was and you could follow her to where she is. I want to see that footage. I want to see Caten, and I want to see the tapes from Lab Four."

The ambassador shook his head. "As you can imagine, Colonel, there is highly sensitive work happening in these laboratories. I'm afraid that footage won't be made available."

" _She was already in there!_ "

"O'Neill is correct," Teal'c spoke up. "Major Carter spent the majority of the day in Laboratory Four. You obviously did not care to keep that information 'sensitive' before. It is curious that you have changed your minds now that she is missing."

"You're welcome to look around that lab all you want," the cop told him with a shrug, "but you're not getting that footage."

"Why not?" Daniel asked.

"Policy," the ambassador said simply.

"Not good enough," Jack challenged.

"Colonel," Rina tried with that same patronizing smile he'd wanted to smack off her face for the last hour. "We have been most generous. We have shared our technology, our culture-"

"You've kidnapped a member of my team."

"Enough," Ferin snapped. "Intimations and allusions are one thing, but I will not stand for such outright accusations. Consider your welcome here outlived, Colonel. You will return to your world immediately. When Major Carter is located, she will be sent back to you."

Jack's Beretta was in his hand and leveled at the other man's forehead in a millisecond. Teal'c was only a blink behind. "I'm not leaving without my people," their leader growled. "All of them. Bring me Carter. Right now."

~/~

General Hammond frowned at the Stargate as Daniel Jackson stepped through with his hand in the air, as though signaling surrender. He dropped them immediately as he cleared the event horizon, turning back to watch the rest of SG-1 return. Teal'c was next, his hands behind him – and unless the general missed his guess, they were tied there. Then came Colonel O'Neill, stumbling as though he'd been shoved, and Jackson caught his arm to keep him from tripping and faceplanting on the ramp. The colonel's hands, too, were bound. And he was limping. And bleeding from one eye.

And the Gate shut off.

Hammond's hand was on the microphone switch immediately. "SG-1, where is Major Carter?"

Doctor Jackson's face was drawn. "About that…."


	5. Chapter 5

Sam glanced around the forest, trying to regain her bearing. She'd found the road again, but that wasn't much help, as she didn't know which way led further into the forest and which way led back to the city. She needed to get out of the woods – the sun was sinking, and she knew first-hand that there were creatures there three times her size that wanted to rip her limb from limb.

Then again, she was only in the woods in the first place because the Seladian government – parts of it, anyway – wanted her dead. So the city wasn't a great choice, either. But the city was where her team would be. Where they would be searching for her. She picked a direction and hoped she was right.

~/~

"They have her, sir," Jack growled, wincing against the penlight Doctor Fraiser shoved in his face. "She's not missing. They know exactly where she is."

The man had a head injury of unknown severity, though, so Hammond looked at Teal'c for confirmation. He got it in a deep, "I concur."

"Then we'll need to get her back," the general said. "SG teams three, seven, and thirteen are being recalled as we speak. But I need to know what we'll be facing out there, Colonel. I want Major Carter home as much as you do, but the three of you were overrun. We need a plan."

Teal'c frowned. Daniel looked at the floor. Colonel O'Neill – his last hope for an easy answer – pressed his lips together.

Hammond sighed.

~/~

Sam heard the water before she saw it. The trees bounced the sound, rendering it vague and directionless, but she knew it wasn't behind her, at least. And it wasn't to her left, where the ground rose steeply from the road. She decided to keep to the path, diverting right only if the sound began to wane. Drinking with her hands bound wouldn't be easy, but she'd have to try. She needed water, preferably before the daylight abandoned her completely.

She hit pay dirt, instead. It was a rocky, stepped waterfall, streaming several stories down the ridge to her left. And a waterfall meant a fault, or a collapse of some sort, or…. Well, it meant broken rock, which was exactly what she needed. Not the ones at the bottom, though, eroded smooth by water and time. Careful, lacking balance and mobility with her hands tied, she made her way up alongside the river. She was three-quarters of the way to the top when she spotted it: a boulder of shale or something – something linear – that had broken away from the rock face and fallen. And it looked _sharp_.

It was also several feet out into the water, of course, because she couldn't get _that_ lucky. Wishing she could stick her arms out for balance, she moved carefully from one river rock to the next and found happily that the boulder was just as sharp as it had looked from a distance, with the crack and the layers forming little teeth along the edge. Turning around ever so carefully on top of the rounded rock beneath her feet, she leaned her bound hands into the ridge and began to saw.

If she lost her balance, of course, she was headed down a thirty foot drop into a rocky basin. But if she didn't, she'd have two free hands. And that seemed worth the risk.

~/~

Jack marched into the Briefing Room and slid into a chair. "Where are we?"

"What did Janet say?" Daniel asked instead, though he didn't look up from the diagram he was working on.

"I'm fine. Scans are clear. No concussion," he said. Then, "Where are we?"

"We are mapping the location of the Stargate, the science building, and the city as we remember, them," Teal'c supplied. "A third set of eyes would be most welcome."

Jack frowned. He wanted to storm the Gate, guns blazing. And while he knew that wouldn't get them very far, his gut said it would be more useful than sitting around a table drawing pretty pictures while his 2IC was missing. While anything could be happening to her.

But he didn't have any better ideas. So he grabbed on of the finished maps in the middle of the table and started making notes.

~/~

Her hands were free. They were also a little bit bloody and ragged, but that was a price Sam was willing to pay. She'd gotten a good drink and started back down the road. The last of the sun had faded, leaving only a flat, silvery moonlight that hid things and made depth deceiving. She'd already tripped twice.

Headlights flashed over the rise just in front of her, sliding over her face and down to her knees. That was good news, because it meant she she was probably headed toward the city and SG-1. And it was terrible news, because the people in the vehicle likely weren't friendly. She skittered off the road and hunched, but it was too late; the transport slammed to a halt and soldiers came pouring out. "Over there!" one yelled, the beam of his flashlight arcing just inches over her head.

That was it, then; she had no choice. She charged up the ridge in the dark four-limbed, clambering over boulders and around trees. A root caught her foot, wrenching her ankle as she fell hard on her left wrist. But a beam of light swung overhead, the soldiers' shouts not far enough behind, and she pushed up and kept going.

A laser shot cut into the rock to her left. Shards bit into her arm and she pushed herself faster as more beams joined the first, and she knew her odds of survival were tanking, but she refused to give in. The next boulder she vaulted sloped down. She could only see a few feet either direction, but it sure as hell looked like a creek bed running parallel along the ridge, and she figured that was as good of a defensive trench as she was likely to get. Ducking to keep covered, she darted left and ran, lifting her knees out of the shallow water to keep from tripping.

She felt like she was gaining distance, even if she was backtracking. She felt like she was getting out of the danger zone.

And then she felt the searing pain in her side as one of the soldiers finally hit their target. She fell. But she couldn't stop. Pressing the hand to the wound, she compartmentalized the pain and kept running. Stumbling, maybe. But _moving_ , up and out of the ravine onto less open ground.

She tripped again, caught on the same side as the hole above her hip. Her face didn't hit the ground, though… because there was no ground to hit. She'd found the edge of the ridge the wrong way, and her leg screamed at her as her free foot just kept dropping, wrenching her hip in a way the socket wasn't meant for. Then it was her foot's turn, bent free with a crunch from whatever had caught it. She fell hard on her elbow, and then she was rolling, bruise after bruise as she tumbled down the ledge.

She stayed conscious the whole way down, feeling every single snap. She hit bottom on her left side, taking a moment to fight through the nausea and inventory her injuries.

There were too many. And it hurt too much.

And she gave up.


	6. Chapter 6

"We may have an in, sir, but it's not guaranteed."

SG-1 looked up at Siler with waning hope, but Jack gestured him in. "Spill it."

"From the MALP and all of Doctor Jackson's pictures, sir, I'm guessing their technology is only twenty, maybe twenty-five years ahead of ours," the technician said. "But it looks like they've gone fully digital. Fully computerized. Even their weapons."

Daniel nodded. "I'd agree with that."

"We haven't. And that may be our advantage."

"How so?" Teal'c asked.

"Their entire city could be vulnerable to an EM pulse," Siler explained. "It could take out all the logic chips, even in their weapons. But not in ours."

"Because we use good, old-fashioned gunpowder," Jack mused.

"Yes, sir."

The colonel glanced at Hammond, listening from his office doorway. "When do we go?"

"I don't have a modulating pulse generator big enough to be useful yet, sir. But I can build it. Major Carter's design is already in the system."

More waiting. SG-1 collectively frowned.

"And there's no guarantee they aren't EM shielded, sir. This may not work at all."

Hammond frowned, too, but ordered, "Do it. Take any personnel you need. This is top priority."

It wasn't much. But at least it was something.

~/~

Sam didn't know how long she'd been unconscious, but it couldn't been long. She knew that because she was still alive. Because the flashlights were still at the top of the ridge and not the bottom. Because they hadn't figured out yet that she'd taken the express ride to the bottom, and they hadn't figured out where.

That was just about the only thing she had going for her, though. Her vision spun every time she tried to lift her head. Her left wrist throbbed, and she didn't seem to be able to bend it; it was most likely broken. So was her right foot. No, that was putting it lightly; her entire right side was wrecked. Her shoulder ached, her torso throbbed from the blast she'd taken, and everything below that had been thrown all to hell when she'd tripped and wrenched it. From the pain she was in, she thought her hip or pelvis might be fractured. Dislocated, anyway, and that was going to make getting back to the city all but impossible.

And that was bad. Because she wasn't just in pain. She was _cold_. Freezing. And she couldn't decide if that was because the temperature outside was dropping rapidly and she wasn't generating heat anymore, or if she was going into shock. Both options sucked. Both could kill.

But the soldiers on the ridge could kill, too, and if they decided to move down the mountain, her camo pants would only help so much. Ten feet beyond her head was a grouping of bushes – big flowers, little trees, whatever – and maybe, just maybe, she might fit underneath.

If she could get there at all. Carefully, she propped herself up on her left elbow. She drew up her left knee along the ground, biting back a whimper as that took the support out from under her right leg, shifting her bad hip. And she dragged herself maybe six inches. Then she reset and did it again. She was leaving a definite trail – they'd see it if they looked – but it was the best she could do.

It was, quite literally, _all_ she could do. The eternity it took her to drag her broken body beneath the shrub left her sweaty and shaky and breathless. She pulled a few loose branches around herself and gathered up some leaves in the hope they might protect her from both the cold and the men hunting her.

She managed one short prayer for rescue before she passed out.

~/~

Daniel found Jack in the cafeteria, drinking coffee and rubbing at bleary eyes. Snagging some caffeine of his own, he settled across the table and thought they made a good pair. "Did you get any sleep?"

"Not a lot. You?"

"The same. I've been trying not to bother Sergeant Siler and his team, but-"

"You're going crazy out of the loop," Jack finished. "Ditto."

Daniel sipped his coffee and burned the roof of his mouth. And drank more, anyway. "It's been fifteen hours since she radioed you."

The other man glanced at his watch and said, "And nine minutes."

"Do you think she's still alive?"

His inhale was slow and deep. "She said she'd found something. All I can figure is that they wanted whatever it was kept buried."

Jack regretted using that word the moment it crossed his lips. Daniel caught the usage, too, and the tiny bit of hope that had still lit his eyes went flat. "So they buried her?"

"Better not have." Jack pushed to his feet. "Or I'll bury them. Every single one of them."


	7. Chapter 7

"It works, sir," Sergeant Siler told them. "The cage shields it, so they shouldn't be able to hit us back, even if they have a pulse generator of their own. I think it will have a slightly better range than Major Carter anticipated – a couple of blocks. But it only has a hundred and eighty degree spread."

"So we shoot twice," Jack said flatly.

Siler shook his head, though the motion was nearly lost in the giant exoskeleton of electronics he wore. "The capacitors need time to recharge between pulses, sir. With the naquadah core, it's not long – under a minute. But it's still a limitation."

SG-1's leader pressed his lips together. Hell, yes, it was. It left one flank completely undefended.

"So we built two of them."

Jack blinked. It was Daniel who put his feeling into words, asking the technician, "It would be awkward if I kissed you, right?"

The sergeant turned deep red. "There's, uh… well…. Someone will have to wear the second body pack."

"I volunteer," Teal'c said immediately.

"You're wearing that one?" Jack asked. "You're going out there?" The man went off world fairly frequently. But this was combat, not maintenance.

"Yes, sir." The answer was a hundred percent confident. "General Hammond wants me on site in case something goes wrong with the pulse generators." He blinked. "And it's Major Carter, sir."

Jack nodded. He understood that sentiment all too well. "It's been twenty-one hours. Let's do this."

~/~

The leader of SG-1 held a Goa'uld shock grenade in his hands, but the first thing through the Gate was a volley of flash bangs. He hoped they hurt, too. He wanted to make a point, and he had Hammond's blessing. But the alien devices had a longer range, so those went through next. After a moment, Jack and Daniel followed with SG-7, and the mission leader took a moment to admire the twelve bodies on the ground around him.

Teal'c and Siler stepped through with SG-3 and SG-13. True to plan, the two men stepped to the right side of the Gate, turned their backs to each other, and fired.

And the buildings and roads and advertisements around them went dark.

"Nice," Colonel Reynolds said.

"Oh, they're gonna be pissed," Dave Dixon put in, his rifle snug in his arms.

Jack snagged one of the laser weapons from the ground, aimed it safely away, and pulled the trigger. And absolutely nothing happened. "How long are these down for?"

"The pulse induces current in the circuitry," Siler said. "Anything that was powered up is fried, sir. Done."

"That's what I want to hear."

"It means we should try not to hit the science labs," Daniel said. "Not if we want to see the video footage. Or figure out what Sam found."

"Agreed. I don't think we'll have to," Jack said as a crowd came around the corner, led by Ambassador Ferin. "I think we've made our point."

"Fifty percent recharged," Siler said before the enemy reached earshot.

" _What have you done_?" the alien leader demanded.

"I asked first," Jack shot back. "And I'm asking for the last time. Where is Major Carter?"

"We have told you we don't know!"

"And we've told you we know that's crap. So here's your choice: either you tell me what she found and where she is, or the sixteen of us raze this city to the ground."

"You can't do that!" he cried.

"We can," Daniel said, the quiet surety of his voice cutting through the wrathful exchange. "We just destroyed every computer and weapon in a six-block radius. With technology created by the woman you took from us. I think it's only fitting that we use her work to take your city from you."

Rina stepped up beside the ambassador, her brown eyes still infuriatingly warm as she tried, "Colonel O'Neill, please. Be reasonable."

"I haven't shot you yet," he told her bluntly. "So far, I've only killed buildings. _That_ is me being reasonable. And it could change at any moment. Until you _bring me Carter_."

The woman exchanged a glance with her consort before she said flatly, "We can't. She's missing."

Jack chambered a round in his Beretta and aimed it at her face. And this time, there was no one to stop him from using it.

"It's true," she defended, irritated. "We had her, but she escaped."

"Where?" he challenged, his aim still true.

She waived vaguely at the ridges east of town. "Caten took her into the mountains."

"For what?" Daniel asked. When she didn't answer, he pressed, "To kill her. To keep whatever secret it is you're trying to hide."

Her pursed lips and the flare of anger in her eyes said it all.

"Yeah, I wanna know what that is," Jack decided, abruptly lowering his weapon. "I wanna know what's worth all of this. So you," he said, leveling two fingers at Rina and Ambassador Ferin, "are gonna take me to where you lost my teammate, and these guys" - that was Teal'c and Siler - "are gonna figure out what you're hiding. Dixon, Daniel, you're with me." He turned to Al Reynolds, flanked by his Marines. "Take the nerds to the science lab. If these guys decide to try anything – they come after you or you lose contact with us – you burn this city to the ground."

"Love to," the other colonel said grimly.

Jack waved the Beretta at Rina again. "Move."


	8. Chapter 8

Everything hurt. Absolutely everything, save for one spot above her left hip. But the reprieve went no higher, because the ribs above that were bruised or broken. Sam was lying on her back, which was strange, because she didn't remember rolling that way. And for as much pain as the movement would have caused, she thought she would remember. Her bad hip wasn't a big fan of laying flat, anyway, and she tried to pick her knee up a bit. But the effort shot pure agony through the wound in her right abdomen and the crushed bones of her foot, and she honestly couldn't decide which was worse. Nausea rose and she squelched it, if only because throwing up would require movement.

There was light beyond her eyelids, fluttering and moving through the leaves of the bushes – plants, whatever – that she'd chosen to hide under. She'd been unconscious for the whole night, then, at least, and she cracked her eyes open to check.

It wasn't sunlight. And she wasn't under the bush anymore. The was a rock shelf two feet above her face, curving down along her right side to the wall. She could tell without even glancing over that it was firelight she'd seen flickering; the area to her left was broad and open. She lay on some sort of elevated ledge opposite the mouth of the cavern, and the light outside was pink again. She'd lost a day.

This was clearly someone's home. Or their hideout, anyway. There were worn, tattered blankets on the floor like the one that covered her, and the fire was well-tended. Someone had found her and carried her here. At least in the short term, they had probably saved her life.

But they weren't there now. And that meant their efforts were going to go to waste, because the figure that slunk out of the shadows was one she recognized. If there was any doubt in her mind that the massive, fanged beast that approached her was the same one who'd murdered Caten and his guards the day before, the blood on his snout and paws wiped it clean away.

So she would be dinner tonight, then. It had found her, obviously through the smell of the blood on her tattered hands and God only knew where else. As her throat tightened in fear, the annoyingly rational part of her brain told her that she'd known this would happen. That running hadn't saved her but simply delayed the inevitable.

It crept toward her on three paws, the fourth held against its chest. It had gotten injured the night before, then, and she wanted to feel bad about that but for the fact that it was going to _eat her_ , hurt paw or no hurt paw. The beast was easily three times her size, four to five feet tall at the shoulder even as it lurched along three-footed. It rose up beside her, its massive shoulders and horned head blocking out the light. She caught a whiff of rotting breath and wanted to heave, but swallowed it back. Because eaten while helpless was a terrible way to die, but it was mildly better for her ego than eaten while helpless and covered in her own vomit.

Sucking in a deep breath, she closed her eyes and hoped the pain would be over soon.

~/~

"How's it going back there?" Jack asked as the transport he sat in rumbled up the mountainside.

"Oh, peachy," Reynolds reported through the radio. "They're being delightfully cooperative. Can't imagine why."

"Me, either." It couldn't possibly have been because of the Beretta he held in his lap, aimed more or less at the two alien civilians across the aisle. Or because of the assault rifle Sergeant Penhall held in the front seat, beside the driver. Or because of the big ass EMP 'bombs' they could let loose at any time. "Keep me updated."

"Will do."

Jack pinned Rina with a cold stare and asked the question he'd been pondering for a full day. "Where's Caten?"

"Dead," she answered tightly.

"Oh, yeah? Good for Carter."

"It wasn't Major Carter."

"Then who was it?" Daniel asked.

"I told you," she pressed. "There are unimaginable creatures in the mountains. Creatures that kill. It isn't wise to be out here so late in the day. We should come back in the morning."

"Come back in the morning," Jack echoed dryly. "My teammate is out there, lost and alone and unarmed. And _you_ put her there. And you think we should leave her for a second night? Because you're afraid? Buck up, princess."

"Look at it this way," Colonel Dixon told her lightly from the seat to his right. "The worst thing that can possibly happen to you is what you meant to have happen to her. Sometimes karma's so beautiful I just can't stand it."

Rina stared at her feet.


	9. Chapter 9

It hadn't eaten her yet. Sam could feel the heat of the its breath on her cheek, smell the awful stench. Her heart pounded in her ears, but she could hear its panting, too, and irritation surged inside her that the beast had to terrify her rather than just getting it over with. The time lagged, and lagged some more, until she couldn't take it anymore and opened her eyes to see what was happening.

The creature's face was only a foot from hers, and through the red, matted fur, two surprisingly blue eyes stared back. It rose a bit, until the paw cradled to its chest was level with her little ledge. And as it let the paw fall away, a cascade of tiny berries piled on the rock beside her head.

And the beast skittered to the other side of the cave.

Sam's gaze flickered uneasily between the animal and the mound of berries it had left. She'd expected to _be_ dinner, not be _brought_ dinner, and the sudden upending of the equation had her off guard. This was a vicious beast. She was absolutely certain it had killed Caten and his two henchmen, and now it hunched in a corner, looking cowed and unsure.

Unsure. She almost laughed aloud at that – at her ridiculous compulsion to assign emotions and motives to plants and animals as though they were people.

Then it struck her. And her heart skipped a beat. "You're one of them, aren't you?" she asked quietly. "One of their experiments. You're human."

It made a grunting noise, and she wondered if it – he or she – knew how to speak. If it was physically capable of speech, with a mouth formed that way.

If it even had the capacity to understand speech.

She needed to communicate, and she needed to eat, and two things seemed fairly well aligned at the moment. Biting back the cringe of pain, Sam reached across with her good hand (but bad shoulder) and picked up one of the berries, popped it in her mouth and said, "Thank you."

It grunted again. And she could swear the movement it made was a nod.

~/~

"We can track her on the surveillance footage until they shove her in the back of a vehicle and leave the city," Reynolds reported over the radio as Jack scanned the trees with his flashlight, looking for any sign of his 2IC. "So that's not nearly as interesting as what happens in Lab Four. They spend the next couple of minutes running around to all the computers. Deleting things, if I had my guess."

SG-1's leader keyed his radio by muscle memory, never abandoning his search. "Have you figured out what she found?"

"Specifically? No. The footage isn't clear enough to read the screens. But Jack, it could have been anything. The science they're doing here is seriously sketchy."

"Such as?"

"Cloning," he said. Then, "People. Babies. They made four clones and raised them in different environments to see how they'd do. One was all but abandoned; one was abused. They do stuff to prisoners, too – break a law here, and you're basically signing yourself up for invasive medical experiments until you die or get out. But mostly die. It's like there's no moral oversight at all, y'know? We had all that uproar about cloning a damn sheep, but here…. It's like as long as it's progress, they don't care."

"Do they know?" That was Daniel's voice. "The public. Do they have any idea what their government is doing?"

"Some of it. They know about the prisoners," Reynolds told him, "but they accept it as a consequence of breaking the law, I guess. Here's the thing: morally questionable as it all is, this stuff was easy to pull up. It might be classified, but it's not hidden. It sure looked like whatever Carter found, they were trying to hide."

Jack set his teeth. "Makes you wonder how bad it is."

"Exactly."

"Sir."

Jack headed for the beam of Penhall's flashlight and the man standing in the dark behind it. "Yeah."

"One of the soldiers said he thought he tagged her right before she veered off and disappeared, right?" the sergeant asked. "I'll bet it was here."

He shifted the light a few inches. The mark on the rock was small, but it was definitely a hand print. In blood, and it made Jack's jaw go tight. His teammate had been most likely shot and definitely bloody a full day before. She was a helluva fighter, but that didn't look good. "Mark this as her last known location."

"Yes, sir."

"Jack!"

That was Dixon, from higher on the mountain, and the colonel trotted up the steep creek bed to meet him. "What've you got?"

The patch of dirt at his feet was bare of the leave that covered everything else. The clear swatch continued over the lip of the ridge and several feet down the sharp decline.

"What are you looking at?" Daniel asked, joining them at the edge of the ridge.

"Something slid through here," the other colonel told him.

With any luck, it had been Carter. On her rear. Carefully. But Jack wasn't feeling particularly lucky, and the drop was long. Frowning, he stepped onto the slope and skidded his way down.

~/~

She'd built cover, and that was a good sign. She'd obviously had to drag herself to it, which implied injury, which wasn't so good. But the act of choosing a decent hiding spot and improving on it implied not just consciousness, but coherence, and that was the best news Jack had heard all day.

The issue, of course, was that Carter wasn't _in_ the nest she'd built. Nor had she crawled out of it in the same manner she'd used to crawl in, which implied she hadn't left under her own steam. Lips pursed, he turned on the ambassador in frustration. "If I find out that your people have her-"

"If they do, I know nothing," the alien defended.

"That would be easier to believe if you hadn't lied to us from the very beginning," Daniel told him.

"Anything?" Jack asked as Dixon finished his survey and headed back to the group.

"No human prints, and no other signs of Major Carter's blood," he said grimly.

Too grimly. "But?" the archaeologist prompted.

"Rina was right," he continued. "There are tracks. Big tracks. Probably a predator."

Jack's chest turned icy. That was it, then; he was going to find her dead and disfigured somewhere in the frigid valley.

"Nothing here, sir," Brooks called from further out.

"Let's assume she found some random Good Samaritan," the colonel said, because he couldn't bear to think anything else. "Let's assume she's conscious. Where would they want to go?"

"Away from the soldiers," Daniel said.

"To the city to find you guys," Dixon put in. "But that's miles away, and she's hurt."

"To a vehicle, then," Penhall decided.

Jack nodded and turned to Rina. "Caten brought her out here in a car, and if he's dead, he's not using it. Where is it?"

"It has been taken back to town," she said coldly.

"Where _was_ it?" She didn't answer, and his hand found the grip of his sidearm again. "I swear I'll do to you what you tried to do to her."

She eyed the mountainside with disdain, because they were going to haul her back up it as roughly as they'd hauled her down, and she was hardly wearing the right shoes for that. "Further up the road."


	10. Chapter 10

The world outside the cave entrance was pitch black, and Sam wondered how many hours she'd lost this time. But even the thought of checking her watch – of moving a muscle – was painful and exhausting. She tried to blame the berries for the nausea she felt, but it was a lie. She was hot and damp and parched and icy, all at once, and that wasn't good.

The creature still watched her from the corner.

No. The _child_ still watched her. Given the dates of the program, it – he or she – couldn't be more than thirteen. And from the growth on the valley, he'd been on his own for at least six or seven years. He, Sam decided, because with all he'd been through, it seemed absolutely inhuman of her to call him 'it.'

She had no idea what to say to him. No idea how to even address what had happened to him or how he'd managed to survive. But she didn't have much choice. Whether he could speak or not – whether he could understand her or not – she had to find a way to engage him. If she didn't, he'd end up still crouched in the corner, watching her die of sepsis. Or shock. Or internal bleeding. Or….

That was an unhealthy line of thought. She tried to abandon it, but a shiver rattled through her, shifting broken bones and making her grunt in pain. It spurred him into action, scooping a torn blanket off the floor and gently laying it over her. The last time he'd been so close, she'd been terrified. Now she felt nothing but compassion.

"My name is Sam," she told him softly, pointing at her chest with her mostly intact right hand. "Sam. What's your name?"

He didn't run away. But he didn't answer, either.

"Have you been alone all this time?" That got her nowhere, either, though his clear blue eyes were glued to hers. "I'm so sorry for what happened to you."

He turned and loped off into the dark.

~/~

The rising sun hadn't made it over the mountains yet, and the gray light that surrounded them matched Jack's mood. Morning gave Carter a better chance of survival and gave _them_ a better chance of finding her. But it also signaled that she'd spent two full nights there already, injured and alone. And that pissed him off.

"Sam?" Daniel called for the forty thousandth time. "Sam?"

"Major Carter!" Dixon's voice was further off, bouncing through the trees.

"Reynolds to O'Neill," their radios crackled. "We found it, Jack."

It wasn't Carter, but it was a break from the monotony, at least. Eyes still scanning the forest floor for his second, he said, "Yeah. Talk to me."

"Lieutenant Fisher restored a system backup from last week and compared it to yesterday to find the missing files. And they're doozies. They were working on a genetic engineering program, gene-splicing human embryos. The program moved in on patients at a bunch of infertility clinics. If the parents were healthy, with good genes of their own, they'd experiment on those embryos and stick 'em back in. If they weren't as top-notch, they got embryos that weren't even theirs."

"Some sort of eugenics program?" Jack asked. "Creating a perfect human?"

"Hell, no, they already do that. This is much worse," the other colonel said, and SG-1's leader glanced at Rina to find her mouth screwed up tight. "The genes they were splicing in weren't even human. They were trying to breed thicker skin, larger cardiovascular systems, increased muscle mass. In the first batch, fur for cold climates."

"I don't understand," Daniel piped up through the radio. "I mean, I get it, I guess. To choose gender, or blue eyes. Or better teeth. But why this?"

"It was a military program, Doctor," Reynolds said simply. He didn't elaborate. And Jack couldn't, pressing his lips together as he swallowed down rage.

"They weren't trying to make better kids, Jackson," Dixon's voice said finally. "They were trying to make better soldiers. Super soldiers. Y'know how Russia used to freeze out enemy armies? That would be tough to do with a squad that grew its own coats."

Jack glanced over to see the archaeologist shake his head in disgust.

"They tried for exoskeletons," Reynolds went on. "Better hearing, better eyesight. Claws."

"They can't have kept this secret," Jack managed finally. "These people wanted to be parents. Didn't they figure it out?"

"Most of the women miscarried within a few weeks," the radio told him. "Ninety percent. Thousands of nonviable fetuses, over seven years. The majority died in utero; some were stillborn. But the parents were told they died, regardless. Under two hundred survived, and half of those didn't live to age two. They were sent to camps for more medical testing. Training. But that went about as well as you'd expect. They scrapped the program six years ago."

There was a pause before Daniel asked, "What did they do with the children who survived?"

Another pause. Then, "You don't want the answer to that."

No, he really didn't.

"No sign of Carter yet?" the man in town asked, more than ready to be done with the subject.

"Signs, yes," Jack said. "Carter, no."

"All right. We're secure here. We'll keep the home fires burning for you."

And then it was silent. Dead silent. The leader of SG-1 looked up to find three of the four members of SG-13 staring at Rina and Ferin with unmitigated murder in their eyes.

Because they were fathers.

Jack had been a father, too, once. And the idea of someone mutilating the child he'd wanted so badly lit a fire of rage in his gut he wasn't sure he'd felt before.

But Carter was still missing.

"Let's move," he ordered, and it came out a growl. "Eyes open."


	11. Chapter 11

He'd brought her more berries, piling them on top of the ones still left from the night before. Her stomach roiled at the thought of more food, and Sam had to remind herself that it wasn't just nutrition. They were mostly water, and she needed that. If only because she was pretty sure she could feel her left leg oozing.

She wasn't sure. Sitting up seemed beyond impossible.

"Can you speak?" she asked him gently before he could retreat to his corner. "Do you have a name?" He made that same jerky motion with his giant head, and she pressed, "Is that a yes? You have a name?"

He did it again.

"Can you tell me? Can you speak?" Even if he could, she couldn't imagine the last time he'd actually done so. It had been half a decade at least. "It's okay," she coached gently. Her left arm was in too much pain to move, but she reached across for him with her right.

The creature – the boy – lurched back, staring at her hand in alarm, and she put it back at her side. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to frighten you. I'm just trying to learn more about you. I…."

She wanted to help. But the words were useless, because she couldn't even help herself. Her sigh was heavy and painful. "I wish I knew how to communicate with you."

He crept closer again, lifting a paw. Careful, he took one berry from the pile and lumbered over to a flat spot on the wall across from her. He crushed the berry into it, leaving a reddish purple stain as he drew an off-kilter circle. A dee, maybe; it was flat on one side. He pointed to his chest, the same way she'd done, and Sam asked, "Is that…. Is that your name?"

The sound that came out of him lived somewhere in the sphere of a bark or cough or growl, and she was certain she wouldn't be able to emulate it. But it had two syllables, for sure. "Say that again?"

He repeated it. Then again.

"Daret? Dalet?" His head jerked, and she repeated, "Dalet?"

A smile slid across her face as he nodded again. "It's nice to meet you, Dalet. I'm Sam."

~/~

"I knew nothing about this."

Jack ignored the ambassador, his eyes still sweeping the road. Dixon and Penhall moved through the trees to his right, doing the same; Daniel and the other half of SG-13 walked to his left. Rina stumbled along near Daniel, which was probably a good choice. He was probably the least likely to gut her and leave her bleeding.

"I swear to you, I didn't know. I'm a father. I have children of my own."

If that was supposed to ingratiate him to the man who'd lost a son of his own, he'd really missed a memo.

"Colonel, I don't know how to convince you, but I didn't know."

Jack spun, sending the other man's eyes wide. "Is that supposed to absolve you?" he asked coolly. "Maybe you didn't know what they were doing to those kids, but you knew they took Carter. You probably knew they were gonna kill her, and you lied about it. So you want mercy from me because you were only complicit in one murder and not thousands? I'll pass."

Ferin's eyes flared. "That's rich from a man who has held a gun to my head twice now."

"Let's be clear on something. I'm not claiming moral superiority here. I've killed people. More than I can count. But I've always done it to protect people who are better than me. And Carter is better than me," he told the other man. "She's smart. She breaks barriers and bends the laws of the universe and saves lives. And she does it all without hurting innocent children. You don't have that excuse," Jack pressed. "You can't tell me you're protecting other good people. Because every single person involved in this is a soulless scumbag. Keep walking."

There wasn't far to go; the crushed grass on the road in front of him ended in four dark spots. "It was parked here," he announced for the other soldiers to hear.

"Sam?" Daniel called into the woods. "Sam, answer me."

But the only sign of her was the swirled impression from where the vehicle had been turned around.

And that struck Jack as wrong. "You said Caten was dead," he told the ambassador flatly.

"Rina said that," he defended. "I know nothing of it."

"Rina!" he snapped, and it brought not only her to the road, but Daniel and Dave Dixon, as well. The others kept searching. "You said Caten's dead."

"And?" she asked coolly.

Dixon glanced around and got the point. "Where? How? There's no sign of that here. What, did your people decide he was a weak point and finish him off?"

She glared at him. "No."

"Then where did it happen?" Jack pressed. "They drove her here, dumped her out. And somehow she escapes and Caten ends up dead. But she didn't kill him. So what the hell happened?"

Her lips pressed into a fine line and she didn't answer.

"Rina, I swear to God-"

"Sirs!" Brooks stood further down the road, shaded. "I think you're gonna want to see this."

The last time someone had said those words, she'd been dragged off for execution. Wrapping a hand around Rina's upper arm, Jack hauled her down the road.


	12. Chapter 12

Sam didn't remember closing her eyes, but she woke with a raging headache to add to the rest of her pain. Dalet had put another blanket over her – probably to ease her shivering, but no amount of blankets could do that. She needed antibiotics badly. And soon.

Turning her head to the left, she blinked to clear the fuzz from her vision… and went wide-eyed. He had drawn for her. The wall was covered in the berry die, sections of drawings grouped together ten feet wide. They were terrible, of course – stick figures and shapes – but he was communicating, and that was amazing in itself. "Oh, my God."

Dalet heard her and rushed to a section on the left side of the wall. There were large triangles for the mountains and smaller ones for the trees. She took the long horizontal line to be the man-made valley, because to the left of it were three tall stick figures behind a shorter one. Sure enough, Dalet put a paw on the lone figure and then held it out to her, pointing. "You're the one who saved me," she murmured. "I thought so. Thank you; they were going to kill me."

He moved to the right, to the next section of drawings, and her breath caught. It was the same scene, except that the valley was no longer a horizontal line, but a rectangle beneath the soil level. There were several large figures. And dozens and dozens of smaller ones, some already sideways underground.

He'd drawn a massacre, and it shattered her heart to pieces. "Were you there?" she breathed. "Did you see it happen?"

It took a moment for him to answer, undoubtedly considering how to. Finally, he picked up a berry and drew another figure – not far from the other children, but behind the trees. And another figure, further off.

"You escaped. You ran away." Tears sprung to her eyes when he nodded, and she opened her mouth to speak, but he grabbed another berry. He drew a shirt on one of the large people – soldiers, she assumed – then moved back to the section about her and drew the same garb on one of the men who'd tried to kill her. "You knew they were going to hurt me because they'd hurt you," she breathed. "Dalet, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for everything they put you through."

He moved beyond the second section, beyond that horrible memory, to a swath full of tall rectangles with people among them. She had no idea what it meant, but far to the right of the rectangles, in what she thought was a fourth section, was a rounded cave entrance with a stick figure laying on a shelf. "That's us," she said. "Here."

His head jerked in a nod before he set one paw on top of the picture of her and slid it toward the rectangles.

"What? I don't understand."

Carefully pinching a berry between two claws, he drew another figure. Taller, with an oval around the torso, and he pawed it before pawing his own chest. "Right," she said with a nod. "That's you."

He drew another figure across the oval torso, sideways, and pointed to her.

She nodded again. "You carried me here. I know."

His head shook as he put a paw over their joint image again and dragged it toward the rectangles. They were buildings, she realized. It was a drawing of the city. And he was offering to take her there.

The tears broke free and dripped onto the rock below her head. "No, Dalet," she breathed. "They would kill you."

He stared at her, then raised his paws in a motion she recognized as helplessness – that he didn't know what else to do.

Her words came out garbled through her tears. "I would never ask you to go back there. I would never ask you to go back to those people. You _can't_. Dalet, come here."

The blue eyes that approached swam with fear and uncertainty, and she struggled for the right words. "You're amazing, do you know that? You're incredible. But you've done all you can, okay? You have to stay hidden. _Please_. If they find you, they'll kill you. And I don't want that."

One giant paw crept toward her face and tenderly, carefully brushed her tears away. She leaned into the contact, reaching across with her good hand to bury it in his warm, soft fur. "Whatever happens happens," she told him softly. "But none of this is your fault. You've done so much for me already."

The sound he made might have been a sob.


	13. Chapter 13

The swath of blood in the road was too big to belong to one person, which meant it wasn't Carter's. They'd removed the bodies but hadn't cleaned the area, and though Daniel looked a little green, Jack took some smug satisfaction in the deaths of the people who'd tried to kill one of his own.

That feeling was mitigated, of course, by the idea that whatever had killed them was still out there. And so was his teammate.

And then he caught the grim look on Brooks's face and followed his outstretched arm. And for a moment, he forgot about Sam Carter entirely.

Only human intervention could have created such a valley. There were no tree stumps; the ground had probably been cleared by heavy machinery. It was raised because it had been dug up and put down again, leaving chunks of dirt that stuck up everywhere. And there were little pits in it because whatever was under it was decaying.

Jack would have sworn he'd be the first to lose his cool. But it was Dave Dixon who caught Rina by the throat and drove her into a tree, his other hand pulled back in a fist. "Is this where you buried them, you bitch?" he raged. "They were _children_!"

"I wasn't even part of the program then," she choked.

"But you covered it up," Daniel put in quietly. Even he didn't step in to help her. "You knew about it and you covered it up. You're no better than they were."

It was Brooks who stepped up beside his CO and put a hand on the older man's arm. "Sir."

"They were kids." The words were pure anguish.

"I know."

Dixon let her go. But he threw her to the ground first, leaving her cradling one wrist, and no one felt particularly bad about that.

"O'Neill to Reynolds." Jack's voice was gruff, too. Quiet. It only seemed right, in such an awful place.

"We're here," the other colonel responded. "The natives are getting restless."

"Yeah, well, tell the natives we found the mass grave they dug."

There was silence a moment. "Where?"

Jack gave him the coordinates and asked, "Why?"

"I'm making a file of my own," Reynolds said. "There's a lot of data here. Every embryo got a number, into the tens of thousands. So many that they had to abandon the system for the ones who lived because the numbers were just too damned long. The parents' names are in each file. All of it's documented. All traceable."

"You can't release that!" Rina snapped from her place in the grass.

"Haven't you figured out yet that you have no leverage here?" Jack asked her coolly. Through the radio, he said, "Hold on to it. For now."

"Understood. What about Carter?"

"No update."

"Earth's getting restless, too."

"I'll bet." They couldn't hold the place hostage forever; eventually, the local army would dig up some swords or something and come running. There were sixteen people on the rescue mission who could die when that happened, and only one Carter. They were probably already pushing their limits. But Jack O'Neill didn't leave people behind. "We'll find her."

Except that he didn't know where else to look. And the forest stretched for miles in every direction.

~/~

The pile of fuzzy purple beside Sam's head had grown bigger, but she could no longer make her eyes focus on objects that close. That was fine; she could barely raise her arm to pick the berries up, anyway. And she was entirely too nauseous to actually eat them. "Dalet?" she moaned, not because she needed anything. But because – selfishly, she knew – she didn't want to be alone. "Dalet?"

He wasn't there. Which was probably for the best – the stories he'd told her were heartbreak after heartbreak, and he didn't need her death to add to them. Sam let her eyes slip shut and the darkness take over.

~/~

Jack's gaze flickered from the trees to the impression in the ground in front of him and back, his fingers tightening around his rifle. "Eyes open," he called.

"Sir?" Penhall called back.

"There's a track here. A big one. Recent."

Several hands gripped their weapons a little tighter as the leader of SG-1 glanced through the trees at the sinking sun. Could they really spend a third night there? Even armed, it was risky.

He had to find Carter, or he had to call off the search.

Which meant he had to find Carter. And soon.

~/~

Something shook her, jarring broken bones and twisted limbs, and Sam opened her eyes to find Dalet staring down at her in concern. "Yeah. I'm here."

Scurrying to the opposite wall, the boy found a clear space and started to draw – large triangles, then little ones. Then a group of figures.

"They're still hunting for me," she breathed, letting her eyes slip shut again. "I know."

The sound he made startled her awake again; it had sounded almost like the word "no." Blinking hard to keep her eyes in focus, she watched him daub little spots of berry around the legs of the figures he'd drawn.

"Dalet, I don't know what you're trying to say." And she just wanted to sleep.

He pointed at the spots he'd drawn, then pointed at her. Still, she didn't know what that meant, and she gave in to the desire to close her eyes. But seconds later, he was tugging at the pocket of her pants, jarring her wounded limbs and making her moan. "Stop. That hurts."

He did it again, pulling on the fabric, then pointed a paw toward the wall. Then he retreated and tried the other way, pounding a paw on top of the dots before pointing at her again.

Slowly, the idea started to coalesce, and for the first time in several hours, she fought back the desire to pass out. "Camo? There are men in camo in the woods?" He didn't know that word, of course, and she pressed, "Their… their clothes look like mine?"

His affirmative nod was the best news she'd heard in… she had no idea how long. "Oh, God, Dalet. I need…. I need one last favor."


	14. Chapter 14

They took the north path, headed along the other side of the ridge instead of on the road. It was the straightest route between the grave site and Carter's little covered nest. People rarely took the straight route between A and B in strange forests in the dark, but Jack didn't know what else to do, and it was getting dark. They were fanned out again, scanning. Rina had chosen Brooks this time, who seemed to have a cooler head than the rest of them combined.

Something rustled in the bushes to their left, and Jack reached for his weapon even as he called, "Carter?"

No answer.

"Stay put," he told the men to his right as he, Daniel, and Brooks headed toward the disturbance. Rina's options were to follow or be alone, and so she hid behind them. "Carter?"

The bushes shifted again, and she screamed as a giant figure shifted out of its hiding place and just barely into view. It had to be seven feet tall, fanged, and Jack knew without a doubt that it was what had killed Caten. His Beretta came up as Brooks did the same.

"No! No, wait!" Daniel barked, shoving the junior officer's aim toward the ground.

"What are you doing?" Rina cried in terror. "Shoot it!"

It hadn't moved, still barely visible beside a thick tree trunk. It was watching them.

The whole vibe was creepy as hell, and Jack asked warily, "Daniel?"

" _Shoot it_."

"Shut up."

The silence returned, awkward, tense. It only got worse when the archaeologist took a step forward. But he stopped at one, before Jack had to stop him. Putting a hand on his chest, he called gently, "Hello. I'm Daniel."

Brooks blinked and stared at him, his weapon still ready. "What?"

"The hell is that thing?" Dixon asked from behind them, and Jack knew without looking that they were ready to fire, too.

"Daniel," the archaeologist repeated slowly, his attention still solely on the beast twenty feet ahead. "Can you…. Do you speak?"

The mission leader spared half a second to glance at Rina as his teammate's idea sunk in. "I thought the government killed them all."

"I thought that, too," she pressed. "I don't know what that thing is."

"Maybe it's just an animal," Penhall said.

"No, I don't think so," Daniel murmured, taking another single step. Louder, he called, "I'm sorry. I know we look scary, but we're not going to hurt you. We know what happened to you. And I'm…. I'm sorry."

The creature shifted. So did Jack and SG-13. But its paw came up, and from its claws dangled something long and delicate that glinted in the fluttering light.

"Oh, my God," the archaeologist breathed, taking off toward the animal despite Dixon's call of warning. Jack was right on his heels as his teammate examined them and said, "It's Sam."

"Are those-"

"Carter's dog tags!" Jack called back to the other colonel.

"Do you know where she is?" Daniel pressed, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the monster was over twice his size, fanged, and covered in more than a little bit of blood. And that it hadn't said a word. "Can you take us to her? We're worried about her."

It dropped the dog tags into his hands and dropped to all fours, loping away from them into the woods. The archaeologist ran after it.

"Let's move!" Jack ordered, holstering his Beretta to follow the pair.

"I'm not going anywhere with that _thing_ ," Rina growled.

"Okay," Dixon said with a shrug as the rest of the group headed out. "You stay here, then, and get eaten by something else. Ask me if I care." And he took off at a jog.

She scowled and hobbled after them.

~/~

Daniel barely broke stride as he ducked into the cave toward the fire. It took his eyes a second to adjust, but there she was, lying on a shelf in the rock about four feet off the ground. She was all but gray, shiny with sweat, but her chest rose and fell and relief flooded through him. " _Sam_." Rounding the fire, he caught her hand with his own. Only when she gasped in pain did he realize the hand was swollen and bloody, and he carefully released it.

Jack was at his side by the time her eyelids fluttered open; as usual – unlike Daniel – he took a moment to survey the situation and chose a fairly unscathed section of her upper arm to touch. "Major," he told her softly, "we've been looking for you."

Her eyes were clouded and half open, her voice no more than a breath, but she said, "I was thinkin' you might."

"Brooks." Dixon waved the closest thing he had to a medic over to the injured woman before telling the rest of his team, "Set up the litter. We're gonna have to haul her out of here." To Ferin and Rina, he ordered, "Get me transport."

The scientist frowned, of course, but Ferin pulled out his communication device.

The colonel snagged his own radio. Ordinarily, he'd let the other members of SG-1 be the bearers of good news, but he didn't imagine Carter's other teammate wanted to wait. "Dixon to Teal'c. We've got her."

The voice that came back sounded almost – _almost_ – emotional. "That is good to hear."

Brooks had shooed Doctor Jackson away to examine his patient, but Jack wouldn't be moved, and SG-13's leader seamlessly assumed command, moving to the cave entrance to eavesdrop on the ambassador's conversation with his own people and keep an eye as the others went about their orders. Jackson didn't have orders, of course; he stood in front of a wall of crude drawings made of something too purple to be blood. The creature crouched next to him, nodding and grunting as the archaeologist carried on a one-sided conversation. Until Brooks did something that made Carter yelp in pain, at which point it spun with a snarl.

"Easy, Cujo," Dixon called, though his fingers edged closer to his rifle. The nickname earned a dirty look from Jackson, who said something soothing to the animal – creature – _thing_ – and laid a hand on its furry shoulder.

The whole situation was just a little too weird for the colonel to wrap his head around. It was human, he supposed, but was it? It didn't look human. But it had saved a human. It was all very strange.

Jack meandered his way over, and the archaeologist did the same. "I guess he was one of the first to survive," SG-1's leader said. "He's thirteen. She says his name is Dalet."

That did it – an age, a gender. A name. A wave of pity washed over Dave Dixon as he looked over at it – him – again.

"She said it was what?" Daniel asked.

"Dalet?" Jack said. "Dal…. You know I can't remember this stuff. I'd have to ask her again."

The archaeologist's jaw set. "That's not his name."

"What?"

"Dalet," he repeated. "Dalat, daleth. It's the fourth letter of several Semitic alphabets. Like you'd use alpha or bravo. It's not his name," he said again, and his voice shook a little. "It's his designation."

"Man, screw these guys," Dixon growled. "Screw this whole damn planet."

Jack sucked in a long breath for calm and let it out slowly. "He's probably never had a name." Two fingers pinched the bridge of his nose before he muttered, "All right, Carter wins."

"Wins what?" Dave asked.

The other colonel offered him a cringe. "Did you get a transport?"

"Yeah?"

"Make sure it's a big one."


	15. Chapter 15

They'd ridden most of the way back to the city in the transport (with Penhall and his rifle up front), but Jack squeezed his 2IC's non-swollen hand and got out ten blocks shy of the city center. He formed a perimeter around the vehicle with Daniel and SG-13, all well aware that they were in more danger in town than in the forest. And they had no idea what to expect.

"We're at the Gate, Jack," Reynolds reported through the radio.

"Copy that." It was late, dark, the streets emptier than Jack thought he'd ever seen them. Then again, he hadn't been this far out.

"It seem quiet to you?" Dixon asked, not bothering to key his radio.

"Yup."

"We still don't know that they didn't know, Jack," Daniel said. "This might not have made a single ripple."

"Let me tell you about my wife, Doctor Jackson," Dixon said from his place directly opposite the archaeologist. "When our first born was starting to run and Lainie was thirty-seven months pregnant with our second and out to _here_ , Joe got away from me. He ran straight to a set of automatic doors that dumped out into a parking lot. She sprinted – _sprinted –_ and caught him about two feet shy of outside. But somebody else's toddler got away and ran, too, when she saw the doors open, and my unbelievably pregnant wife threw our kid over one shoulder and went after that one. Into the parking lot. At a dead run. And after she caught the second one, some moron honked at her, and honest to God, Jackson, I thought she was going to claw his eyes out of his face and feed them to him while still holding two toddlers. Because motherhood is a fearsome, terrifying thing. So I don't give a damn about your cultural relativism or any other argument you've got; the fact is that thousands of women walked into those clinics to become mothers. And not only was that dream taken from them, their babies were taken. And manipulated. And murdered. I promise you, this made more than a ripple. Thousands of women, with husbands and girlfriends and parents. This was a tidal wave."

Daniel looked pointedly around the dark, empty street and didn't bother to answer.

It was another half a block down that they heard it – shouting that grew louder with every step. There were people in the streets seven or eight blocks up, and though Jack thought they were probably on the same side, he was escorting a Seladian military transport vehicle. "O'Neill to Reynolds. Are we gonna have crowd control issues?"

"Nope," the other man said. "Just tell 'em you're with me."

They rolled through a street, and Jack glanced left to a plaza where a small group of people watched a televised billboard. The headline below the news anchor read _Secret Government Program Revealed: Thousands of Embryos Stolen,_ _Children Killed_. He kept walking.

The driver had apparently told Rina, though; the transport stopped suddenly as she jumped out the back door. "You had _no_ right!" she raged.

"You really want to talk to us about right and wrong?" Dixon drawled.

"You know what's funny?" It wasn't, not really, and Jack's face was flat. "If you'd left it alone, Carter would have come to me, we'd have canceled our deals and gone home. I didn't escalate this," he pressed. "You did. You took somebody from me, you lied about it, and you tried to kill them. Sound like anything you've done before?" He pointed at another screen for emphasis just in time for the news to cut to a photo of Rina, Caten, and several other people in white coats. "Ooh, look at that. You should probably get back inside the vehicle. Because my people aren't gonna hurt you, Rina, but I can think of a few thousand others who'd like to see you hang."

Daniel waited until she was safely back inside before he asked, "With all these people around, what are we going to do when we reach the Gate?"

"About her?"

"No. The other thing."

Jack shrugged. "Back it up to the wormhole and be quick about it, I guess."

"That's a terrible plan."

"Wouldn't be my first."


	16. Chapter 16

SG-7 was first to step through the wormhole and down the ramp. Dixon was right behind them, his arms crossed and a grimace on his face as he looked up at the window to the Control Room. "You're gonna be pissed, sir, but I don't think it was the wrong call."

"What does that mean, Colonel?" Hammond's voice echoed through the room.

"It means we figured it was better to ask forgiveness than permission on this one." To the SFs around him, he said, "Don't shoot."

The rest of his team stepped through, bearing Carter's weight between them. Then, between Jack and Doctor Jackson, came Dalet. The collective gasp that went through the room was audible, and though their weapons stayed low, the guards clutched them close.

The kid shrank back, causing Siler to run smack into him as he stepped through the Gate. "Oh. Sorry, uh…."

"It's okay," Carter murmured, holding her hand out to the creature who'd saved her. "It's okay. Dalet. Take my hand."

And he did, enveloping her tiny one in his enormous paw as the whole unit moved down the ramp. SG-3 stepped through, and the wormhole shut off.

There was silence for a long moment before Hammond reached for the microphone again. "It's good to have you back, Major. Colonels – my office. Now."

"Saw that comin'," Dixon muttered as he handed off his weapon.

A medical team with a cot and Janet Fraiser passed the three team leaders (and Daniel) on their way out. And in true scientist fashion, she paused, glanced at the enormous, bloody beast standing over her patient, and asked cheekily, "Made a new friend?"

"This is gonna hurt and it's okay," the other woman warned him as they lifted the litter and set her on the cot. They were gentle, but it still earned a sob that she tried and failed to laugh off. "His name is Dalet," she told the doctor weakly. "He's a teenager. Genetically modified. He saved me."

"Oh," she said lightly, and lifted her gaze to find two very uncertain blue eyes looking back. "Well, in that case, hello, and thank you. I'm a doctor; I'm gonna take Sam for a bit, because she needs to be checked out. And you…. You need a bath."

~/~

Because he wasn't military, Daniel didn't grasp that the worst possible thing he could say as he trailed General Hammond to his office was, "I mean, Sam's got this all figured out."

The general stopped in the middle of the Briefing Room and spun, giving him a glare before transferring the expression to the three colonels. "Oh, does she? A severely injured, feverish _major_ made this decision?"

"I made the decision, sir," Jack answered, "but I think her plan's a good one."

"And if her plan doesn't work? Colonel, you never should have taken it off that planet."

"There's no place for him there," Daniel argued.

"There's no place for him _here_!" It was almost a yell, as red spread up the older man's cheeks. "Hiding Mister Teal'c is difficult enough, but at least he can wear a _hat_. That creature can never be seen outside this mountain, and it can't stay here. You know as well as I do that its fate here won't be any better than its fate there."

"His fate, sir." The correction from Dixon was quiet, but firm. "He's a boy. Human."

For a moment, Hammond just stared at him. Then, "I realize this will be an unpopular opinion, but no, he isn't. The chimpanzees in the Colorado Springs Zoo have over ninety-eight percent of the same DNA I do. They live in communities, they problem solve, they make art, if you can call it that. My daughter has recently decided that they have a better way of peeling bananas than she does. But none of that makes them human. That thing is not human."

"General, DNA aside, he's remarkable," Daniel put in. "And I don't mean scientifically. I wouldn't know anything about that. But he…. As far as we can tell, he was stolen from his parents, sent to a medical research facility and then on to a military training camp. The people who were supposed to care for him tried to murder him, and he's been on his own ever since. He has probably never known an ounce of human kindness in his entire life. And yet he saw Sam in trouble and intervened. And _cared_ for her. He even put his own life at risk to help her. At thirteen years old, with absolutely no reason to have morals of any kind, he understands good and evil. And he chooses to do good. And that…. I don't care what's in his DNA; he's a person. His humanity may run deeper than anyone's."

Hammond considered that for a moment, running a hand over his head, before he answered, "You raise a good point, Doctor Jackson. If we're to think of him as a child, then he has parents. Are they even aware he's alive?"

"There's no place for him there, sir," Jack said.

"Isn't there? It seems to me you want it both ways, Colonel. You brought him to this base and called him deserving of our help because he's human. But if he's human, he has a family already. And if he doesn't, then he isn't, and you never should have taken him – it – out of that forest."

"Ah, so many morally sticky questions that the people who made him conveniently bypassed," Dixon put in.

"And if his parents want nothing to do with him? If they reject him outright? Hasn't he been through enough?" Daniel pointed out.

"Haven't _they_ been through enough?" Jack added. "They were told their baby was stillborn. Besides, we don't even know who they are."

Reynolds shook his head. "No, we do. I told you; they documented everything. They'd be in their forties now. But I don't see how that helps us, sir. We're not exactly welcome on that planet. We can hardly step back through and ask to talk to them."

"It'll be interesting to see how things shake out," Dixon said. "Some people saw us bring him through – he's a little hard to camouflage. If that gets out, they may want to track him down themselves."

"If they figure out what he is," Jack said.

Daniel raised an eyebrow. "I did."

"Still not sure what's wrong with Carter's plan, sir."

Hammond sighed at the leader of the team who usually brought him this kind of trouble. And he knew the question would hit deep, so he asked it straight. "If he were your son, would you want to know?"

Jack didn't have an answer.

~/~

Teal'c was already waiting in the enclosure, oversized and in the way, when Sam got rolled in from the post-op room. But he wasn't nearly as oversized as the furry teenager on the other side, who also didn't know anything about how the room was meant to be laid out, and was therefore even more in the way. She offered them both an exhausted wave.

Janet had been serious about that bath; without the coating of dust and dirt on every hair, Dalet was almost black. They'd combed him out, too, and the blue eyes that watched her were now set in the face of a fluffy teddy bear. With fangs. And little stubby horns instead of cute triangle ears. But who was counting? "Well, look at you," she murmured with a smile, pressing a hand against his cheek.

His gaze flickered over her, pale and sheet-covered, and Teal'c said, "He has been most concerned for your well-being."

"I'm okay," she promised sleepily. "I'm just exhausted."

"You should sleep."

Dalet seconded that, clearly. Catching the hem of the sheet ever so gently in his claws, he tugged it higher up her waist to keep her warm.

She put a hand over his paw and closed her eyes.


	17. Chapter 17

"He needs to get off this base," Janet Fraiser said, taking a sip of the coffee she'd just stirred. She changed her mind and grabbed two more packets of sugar. "He needs to get back outside. Back to the forest like he's used to."

"Janet, he's a boy," Daniel protested.

"I'm not… I'm not saying we should dump him and leave him." She waved the hand with the coffee stirrer between them in defense. "That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just saying… access. Access would be good. Because I have a teenage half-bear in my infirmary who'd never seen a modern toilet, and that's causing a few issues."

"Oh. Yeah. I could see how that might be a problem."

Colonel O'Neill stepped up with his own mug and said with a cheeky grin, "Teal'c was a real champ there, huh?"

"I don't want to talk about it, sir. How much longer?"

"I think Hammond's giving it another day before we go to Plan B." The speakers around them announced an unscheduled Gate activation, and they all ignored it. They'd had enough action to last the next several weeks. "You could just kick him out, you know, like you do to us."

She blinked at him. "I'm not sure you've noticed, but he is _glued_ to your teammate."

"Wouldn't you be?" Daniel asked. "She's probably the first person who's ever treated him as anything other than an abomination."

"I don't doubt it," she said. "And I wouldn't mind as much, but Sam's stuck in my infirmary, and he's stuck to her, and that means I'm stuck with _him_ , and I could really use a decision from General Hammond right about now. Because I like to keep a nice, sterile space, and his table manners… need work."

"He tried the fork yesterday," the younger man defended.

"He did. Daniel, he's trying. But he's not made for this world. Physically. He's not made for this kind of society. And frankly, I think it's cruel to try and make him fit in. Again, I say: he needs trees. He needs open space." Waving off his disagreement, she pressed, "He needs love, too. He needs a community. But we all know it can't be here. And in the meantime, he's struggling."

Daniel pressed his lips together. "She says he doesn't want to go back."

"Well, they tried to kill him, after all," Jack put in wryly.

"No, not that. To his parents."

"I'm sure he thinks they'll reject him," Janet said. "And he may be right. But thinking it is different than hearing it. That would be terrible."

"Sam says it's more than that. That he knows he'd be a burden, even if they wanted him. That his parents have already grieved for the child they lost, and he doesn't want to open old wounds. He doesn't want his mother to cry anymore."

"Really?" Jack challenged. "She got that out of somebody that can't speak and draws like a five-year-old?"

An SF stepped into the cafeteria and headed for them. "Doctor Jackson, you're needed in the Control Room. It's Ambassador Ferin."

The archaeologist topped off his coffee. "So much for running out the clock."

~/~

Daniel stared at the empty chairs on the computer monitor, tapping his fingers anxiously against the counter top. Hammond stood behind one shoulder, Jack behind the other, and he grimaced at both of them in the glassy reflection. "Just once, could I not be the one to have to talk to the grieving mother? Could we start taking turns or something?"

There was no time for them to answer before a man and woman stepped onto the screen. He held out a chair for her before taking his own. Her eyes were red. And they both looked exhausted. "Hello," the archaeologist offered. "My name is Daniel Jackson."

"We know who you are, Doctor Jackson," the woman said. "Your team has been all over the news here." She had to dab at her eyes.

"I'm sorry," her husband said as he slid an arm around her. "It's been an upsetting few days. My name is Tael. This is my wife, Peda. I don't…. I don't quite understand why we're here."

Daniel turned and shot Jack the dirtiest look he could possibly muster. Of course Ferin hadn't told them, and now it fell to him. "You, uh…. You had a son, right? From one of these clinics. Thirteen years ago."

Peda nodded and told him tearfully, "We lost him."

"Uh… no." The word was as gentle as he could possibly make it. "He survived."

The two stared at each other in shocked confusion before the man shook his head. "He was stillborn. Thank God."

Daniel blinked. "Thank God?" He could feel Jack stiffen behind him, just waiting for them to reject their own child as the monster he was.

"I'm sorry. Perhaps that sounded cruel," Tael said. "It's just that… those children. The things they went through. Being taken from their families, experimented on like animals. Sick. Slaughtered," he managed. "Every story is worse than the last. It's horrifying. And the thought that our child could have gone through that… is almost unbearable."

"Those poor babies suffered from the moment they were born," Peda whispered, no longer trying to wipe away the tears that slid down her cheeks. "Our son was spared that. All he ever knew was warmth. And comfort. The sound of our voices and the beat of my heart. And that we loved him."

Her husband pulled her close. "I think that's all that's getting us through."

Daniel glanced at Jack. Then at Hammond. After a moment, the older man said gently, "The records aren't complete. We must have been mistaken. I'm sorry we disturbed you."

Tael shook his head. "Thank you for bringing it to light. We needed to know. We need to make sure it never happens again."

The two pushed out of the chairs, but Daniel said, "Wait. Your son. Did you…. Did you give him a name?"

Peda sniffled. "His name was Hodrael. It means-"

"Splendor of the Lord," he translated.

"Yes."

Daniel nodded. "Thank you. And we're sorry for your loss."

~/~

Jack watched from across the infirmary as his friend settled into a chair beside Dalet – Hodrael – and put a hand to the teen's furry shoulder. On his other side, Carter did the same, and it occurred to the leader of SG-1 that they were putting a hell of a burden on a very sick woman. And on Daniel, too. "Maybe he was right about that whole 'taking turns' thing," he muttered to his CO.

Hammond raised an eyebrow. "Do you really want to be part of that discussion, Colonel?"

"Oh, heck no."

The general gave a knowing nod. "I have arrangements to make. I'll let you know when everything's in place."

Whatever Daniel said as Hammond left upset the boy, clearly – how could it not? - and his head sunk low between his shoulders. Carter reached for him, touching his face as she said something too quiet to make out, and after a moment, he lifted his head… only to shuffle closer to the bed and lay it on her stomach. She embraced him as best she could from her prone position, tenderly stroking his fur with her unsplinted hand.

The boy wasn't the only one getting attached. And maybe it made Jack a wimp, but he was glad he didn't have to have that conversation, either.


	18. Chapter 18

Carter shifted in her wheelchair with a tiny grunt, drawing her CO's attention. "You okay?"

"Yeah. My hip's just not very happy about sitting upright."

"Well, tell it to stay in its socket next time, and it'll be happier."

"I'll definitely give that a shot, sir." She looked exhausted, still laden with antibiotics and painkillers, but no one was going to tell her she had to miss this.

The Stargate burst to life without warning – their guest didn't need that whole 'dialing' nonsense – and Lya stepped onto the ramp, her face as peaceful and hair as crazy as ever. "General Hammond. Colonel O'Neill," she greeted warmly, her voice soft and musical. "Major Carter."

"It's good to see you, Lya," the other woman answered with a smile.

"Are you ill?"

Her concern was obvious, and Carter waved it off. "I'll be fine."

So the Nox woman turned her attention to the bottom of the ramp, where the one she'd come to see stared at her uncertainly. "And you must be Dalet."

"Hodrael," Sam corrected – he'd chosen that, instead.

"That is a lovely name. I am Lya of the Nox." Her approach was slow; either the general had warned her of his likely reaction or she could sense it. Or both. When she'd gotten close enough, she reached out both hands in invitation. He did the same, and she took his paws. "Oh, your fur is so soft!" she exclaimed in delight.

And he panicked, scurrying away from her and straight to Carter, who took his face gently in her hands and assured him, "It's okay. It's okay. She likes you."

He clearly wasn't convinced.

"She thinks you're beautiful," the woman in the chair told him, tenderly stroking the fur of his cheek with her thumb. "Just like I do."

"I didn't mean to frighten you," Lya said, her voice quieter though she stayed on the ramp. "The Nox believe that every creation is perfect and wonderful. That all things are exactly as they were meant to be. And yet, I'm jealous. I wish my hair were as soft as yours."

Though he stayed huddled in front of SG-1, he turned to look at her, and she offered him the universe's kindest smile. "Will you come with me? You would have a forest and room to run. And a city. And a thousand creatures who would never ask you to be anything but what you are."

"You could be happy there," Carter murmured as he turned to check with her. "You deserve that. Hodrael…. You would have a home. You would be loved."

The change in him was almost unfathomable. Jack had only ever seen him hunched – anxious and afraid – but when he rose, he was a good two feet taller than any man in the room. He turned to face their visitor and gave her a nod, confident and majestic.

Still kind of terrifying. But in a majestic kind of way.

"Hodrael."

He dropped immediately back to all fours in front of the woman he'd cared for – the woman who'd cared for him. Careful of her injuries, she leaned forward, placed a hand on either cheek, and pressed her lips to his forehead. "Thank you."

The paw he put to her cheek was almost as big as her entire head. And then he turned to join the woman on the ramp, who waved an arm and reopened the Stargate for home. "Thank you for bringing him to me," Lya said. "He is a gift. Hodrael, let's go home."

They stepped through the event horizon together – the giant creature and the woman smaller than one of his arms – and the wormhole shut off. And Jack pretended not to notice as his 2IC swiped tears from her cheeks. After a moment, he asked, "You ready to go back?"

"Yeah. I'm exhausted."

"Okay." Taking the handles of her wheelchair, he steered her neatly toward the doors, still ignoring the hand that occasionally came up to wipe her face. But then it wasn't her face, it was her mouth, and he commented wryly, "Got a little fur, did ya?"

"I think he might be starting to shed," she muttered. "Probably should've warned Lya about that."

"Perfect and wonderful, remember? Shedding is perfect and wonderful."

The way he repeated the Nox woman's words made her chuckle.

"And I think, as a consolation prize and recovery gift, I'm gonna get you a dog."

He wished he could see her face as she just barely managed, "What?"

"A dog, Carter. Right up your alley. Big and furry and -"

"That's okay, sir, really."

"And he can slobber all over your furniture -"

"I'm good," she insisted.

"And dig big holes in your back yard."

"As lovely as that sounds -"

"A Great Pyrenees, I think. It's not big enough, obviously, but you get the drift, with the fur and all."

"But… but…. No," she pressed, grabbing the loophole and holding it tight. "You're right; it's just not big enough. It just wouldn't be the same."

Behind her, he grinned at her desperate attempts to bail herself out by any means necessary. "So what you _really_ want is a pet bear."

"A what? A…. Is it legal to own a bear, sir?"

"Don't think so, no."

"Then… then yes. That's what I want. A bear."

"You sure I can't talk you into a Great Pyrenees?"

"I'm really sure, sir."

God, he wished he could see her face, because the people they were walking past were giving them the strangest looks. "How about a Newfie?"

"A _what_?"

"A Newfoundland. Big, black, slobbery things."

"No, no, really -"

"We could name it Bear," he offered magnanimously.

"I don't think that counts."

"I had a buddy with a big black Newfie named Bear."

"Still -"

"They come in brown, too, if you'd rather."

Her head fell into her hands, and he had to choke back the chuckle that would tell her he was kidding. "No, I'm sticking with the real thing," she insisted.

"A real bear?"

"A real bear."

Spinning her around, he backed through the Infirmary doors and righted her again. "Have you thought about a wolfhound? They're skinnier, but they've got the height and coat right."

"Holding firm, sir," she said.

"There's always a Saint Bernard," he offered as one of the nurses approached. "Get a girl. Name her Bernadette."

The nurse smiled at them, though the glance she sent Jack's way was decidedly unsure about their conversation. "I can take her from here, sir."

"Good God, please," Carter begged.

Jack chuckled the whole way back to Daniel's office.


End file.
